The Disappeared (15 page)

As he greeted Mr Ismail, however, Stephen became aware of another contingent of demonstrators, who had emerged from a bus that was disappearing towards the city. Young people in jeans and donkey-jackets, led by a long-haired man in a duffle coat, were converging on the school in a serpentine phalanx. Among them were girls wearing headscarves, surrounding a figure covered from head to foot in a burqa – recruited, Stephen supposed, to show the commitment of the university sociologists to the fight against Islamophobia. Two of the boys held a placard saying ‘Don't tolerate intolerance'; others had begun to shout ‘Gawthrop, Over the Top' in a rhythmical chant. In matters of the greatest importance, Stephen believed, it was debate and not threat that was needed. And if one side to a dispute should begin to shout abuse, disqualifying all opposing views as a kind of ‘phobia', Stephen's instinct was to close his ears against the noise. He walked on quickly into the school, alarmed at the thought of how things might develop.

The Headmistress failed to awaken much interest from the police, who made a routine showing and then retired to a patrol car. She therefore decided to close the school, sending home any pupils who had made it past the blockade. The children were frightened, and Stephen spent the morning conducting them in groups through the shouting mêlée, reassuring them, as best he could, that the threats were in no way directed at them, and that there had been a misunderstanding which would soon be resolved. After an hour of this he returned to the staffroom with trembling legs and palpitating heart, unable to rid himself of the insults that had been crammed into his ears like corn into the gullet of a goose: racist, abuser, even ‘rapist' from the person in the burqa who screamed at him through the cloth and who, to Stephen's hearing, was almost certainly a man.

He took the key from the staff-room and let himself into the chapel. He would sit it out there until the noise had subsided and the crowd dispersed.

The Christian religion was a fleeting and uncertain visitor in Stephen's life. He was the only child in a family of atheists, who viewed worship as a hobby of simple people, like stamp collecting, clay pigeon shooting or model railways. At the time of his parents' divorce, when he was studying for his A-levels in a North-London grammar school, he had read the New Testament and taken to visiting a Roman Catholic church. Later, at Oxford, he had attended evensong in the college chapel, partly to enjoy the singing of the choir, but also in search of a peace that he needed and which always seemed to lie just out of reach: the peace that passeth understanding, as he learned from St Paul and the Book of Common Prayer.

By then he had acquired, from Bach and Haydn as much as from the study of English literature, an acquaintance with the Christian faith and its cultural meaning. He had joined the extensive crowd of believers in belief. The Christian religion, he decided, was the heart of our civilisation. This heart had grown old and weak, and culture had been put in the place of it. But the heart transplant didn't take, and our civilisation, after gasping for a while, had died.

In the opinion of Harry Fisher, the long-haired expert on Virginia Woolf who had been appointed as Stephen's tutor, Stephen was busy with the work of mourning. He was conducting the spiritual exercise through which the grief over one loved thing becomes a welcome extended to the next. ‘And that's great, Steve,' Harry had said, ‘but after religion what next can there be?' Stephen had no idea. Along with the millions of civilisation's orphans, he was waiting for a revelation that he knew would never come. Yet, in the real troubles nothing else, he believed, had ever offered consolation. For in the real troubles it is not the body but the soul that is threatened. Such, if it deserved the name, was Stephen's faith.

There had been few real troubles in Stephen's life: his parents' divorce, yes, which left him bruised and guilty, believing himself to have played an obscure part in causing it; a love affair at Oxford, which ended in bitterness and jealousy when a rival appeared; his father's sudden death during his final Oxford year; but otherwise only the routine difficulties that lie across the path of a poetic but indolent bachelor. Sharon, however, was different. Here desire wore a mask of duty, and duty forbade desire. Sharon needed help, and refused all other ways of obtaining it: he alone could protect her. But she also wanted him, with an urgency that her situation fully justified, and which tore through the rules like a hornet through a spider's web.

He had begun to imagine himself alone with her, escaped from their situation, able to plant his kisses on that adorable adoring face, and to drive all her demons away. But imagining this he also summoned the jealousy that she did not deserve, the pain of what they had done to her, which was a sword passing through her body into his. And then the tears would flow: tears of anger and humiliation, and an urgent desire to place all this before her, to beg her forgiveness and to show the respect that she longed for, and which was, he knew, the only salve for her hurt.

He looked up at the solemn face of St Catherine, a face expressing another kind of love, in which neither sex nor selfishness had a voice. Humans, he thought, could not rise to such a love by their own efforts but would always need the help of prayer. ‘Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers/ Whose loves in higher love endure.' So Tennyson wrote. But prayer is effective only for those who believe in it. He wondered if Sharon prayed, if she had ever been taught the words that would break those ‘chains of enchantment' that had been thrown around her.

The image came of himself in the role of father, the father she never had, putting her to bed with a prayer. He rehearsed the words of the Hail Mary, imagining that he spoke them above her tired form, that she felt the warmth of his protection and that she fell into a dreamless sleep from which she awoke fresh, pure, to ‘a life that leads melodious days', like the girl she wanted to be and whom she tried to create in her beautiful essays. And this image, which seemed to justify all that he felt for her, accused him too of an illicit desire, told him he must find another way of loving her than the one she had slapped down before him as a challenge.

And then a strange thought came to him. As he reached back into Sharon's life, thinking of what she might have gained had faith and piety protected her, why, he asked himself, should that faith have been the Christian one? Suppose she had been adopted by a Muslim family: by the Kassabs, for instance. Wouldn't her chances have been better? Protected by a code of honour and surrounded by an electric fire of prohibitions, she would have repelled her would-be abusers. This weird thought troubled Stephen greatly. He could not think of Sharon as other than the vulnerable, free-minded, poetic creature that she was; to imagine her wrapped and mummified in a spiritual burqa was to imagine another person entirely – and certainly not a person whom he could honestly love as he loved that girl.

He sat for an hour or more with those thoughts, hoping from time to time that some plan of action would emerge from them, but lapsing almost immediately into a corrosive doubt. To do nothing was impossible. But if Sharon kept strict
omertà
, and forbade him either to discuss her case with others or to know in detail what it was, there was nothing – nothing legitimate – that he could do. Maybe the social workers would step in to save her, but after his encounter with Iona Ferguson he had no confidence that such a thing could happen. And to wait for the police to take an interest would be to wait too long. Moreover, to discuss things with the cynical Jim Roberts was unthinkable. So the problem was Stephen's, and the solution nowhere to be found.

The light was fading, and there was silence now outside. He lapsed into mental vacancy, his eyes resting on St Catherine, his hands folded as though in prayer. Gradually it dawned on him that there was another person in the chapel, breathing quietly at the back. He stood up, hesitated and then turned. The oak door was closing, and he watched the heavy keeper of the latch settle against the catch-plate with a clunk of wrought iron. He went out slowly, and took time in locking the door.

He found her crouched in a corner of the cloister that led to the main building of the school. She hid her face from him. Her slight form was pressed into a niche of stone, the knees drawn up, and the arms wrapped around the shins. He prayed that no one would see them like this. But he could not ignore her. When she looked up at last it was with a face rigid and white.

‘I werena spying on you, honest, sir. Only I saw you go in there and…'

‘And what, Sharon?'

‘It's them, sir. Outside. I canna go past them, sir. I was waiting for you to take me. Only you dinna come. I had to find you.'

‘You can't sit like that, Sharon. Get up and talk to me properly.'

She jumped immediately from her cocoon and stood to attention before him.

‘Sorry, sir.'

‘That wasn't a reprimand. I just want us to speak to each other as equals.'

Sharon looked at him for a moment in silence.

‘I know that, sir.'

She straightened, fitting herself into her body as though for inspection.

‘Surely they have gone by now,' he remarked.

‘Most of them, sir. Not all.'

Best not to enquire. Best to take her out now, catch sight of the ones that scare her. But then what? To track them down? To kill? Such thoughts frightened him. But they suggested a more honourable path than the one that she was urging.

‘OK, let's go. We'll walk together as far as my place, and you'll go on from there to Angel Towers.'

She reached for her satchel, which she had stuffed into the niche out of sight, and went before him towards the front door of the school. Someone had sewn up the loose hem of her pullover and he noticed that her hair too was more tidy than usual, with the wisps that blew across her face held down with Kirby grips. Perhaps Mrs Williams had remembered her adopted daughter at last. Perhaps she was defending Sharon from the men who had targeted her. It was a comforting thought, but he did not pursue it since it was clear from her every gesture that Sharon was scared. As they approached the door she began to hold back; by the time they arrived there she was cowering behind him, emitting little moans of fear.

The door was on a Yale latch and swung shut when opened from inside. He turned the latch firmly and strode out onto the gravel forecourt. Sharon followed with little steps, clinging to his jacket.

The bus hired by the visitors had been driven away, and there was hardly a sign of the day's demonstration: only a few crushed plastic bottles, a couple of Tesco shopping bags and a broken umbrella. The gravel had been scuffed into heaps and would need combing out by the gardener. A branch had been torn from the old hornbeam that was growing on one side of the forecourt, and Stephen was saddened by this, because the view of that tree from the staff-room was one of his consolations. Then he noticed a group of men dressed in Western clothes, loitering on the corner beyond the school gates. They were eying him curiously and one of them was holding what seemed to be a rolled up banner as though it were a sword, thrusting it from time to time into the air, and uttering a low guttural cry. Sharon was moaning and pressing against him. He thought with alarm of the possibility that some lingering member of staff might be watching their progress across the forecourt.

‘It's all right, Sharon,' he said. ‘Just walk normally. Nobody will hurt you.'

‘Canna, sir. Canna walk past them. You gotta take me another way.'

So those were the men, the ones whom he had come to hate, as he had hated no human being in his life before. He looked at them. They were two hundred yards away, four men in their twenties, two with Asian features. They were scowling now, from dark eyes that contained no flicker of friendliness. One of them, taller than the rest, had a squint, and wore a black woollen overcoat; he lounged against a lamppost, his hands in his pockets in gangster pose. Sharon's fear communicated itself to Stephen. He steered her away from the men, towards the old canal that passed under the street a quarter of a mile beyond the entrance to the school, and which was now silted up and clogged with weeds. Alongside this canal there was a towpath, by which they could re-join the road that led to the network of warehouses behind Stephen's flat.

Conscious of the eyes that followed them he walked with awkward steps, veering from side to side and beginning to push against Sharon as heavily as she pushed against him. Reaching the canal, they dropped down some wooden steps off the road-bridge. When her feet hit the towpath Sharon broke into a run. She pulled at his jacket and he began to run beside her. At the next bridge they mounted the wooden steps on to a road that ran parallel to the one they had left. Stephen paused to look behind.

‘There's no need to run, Sharon. No one's following.'

She stopped to look at him and in her eyes he read both fear and elation: fear of the others, elation at being in danger with him. Things constantly happened to deepen the intimacy between them, and he wondered how much she intended this. There was no doubt that her fear was real, but had it been necessary to run in that way, side by side, as though in flight from an invading army? He wondered.

They walked slowly now. He asked who the men were and why she was afraid of them. As expected, he received no reply. But when they entered the car park behind the flats she suddenly began to speak, whispering between tight lips so that he had to bend to hear the words.

‘Bogdan's away now, gone to sea, collecting the goods. It's OK with mum when Bogdan's away. Only today she dunna come home till six. I could sit in your place, sir. I wunna disturb you, just sit there, read your books. Please, sir. Nobody will know.'

‘Look Sharon, all this is very irregular.'

Once again she had trapped him into using the wrong words, the truthful words. For ‘all this' meant so much more than ‘this'.